AMBERJACK

Amberjack is a film about the in-between — between girlhood and adulthood, between memory and myth, between land and water. It’s drawn from my own relationship with Florida, a place I never fully lived in but returned to year after year. That partial, seasonal connection shaped how I saw it: not quite home, not quite foreign — just familiar enough to haunt me.
As a kid, Florida felt like a dreamworld: heavy heat, buzzing cicadas, sudden rain. But beneath that vivid surface, there was always something murkier — a tension between beauty and breakdown, between what’s preserved and what’s let rot. That contradiction became central to the emotional landscape of this story.
Amberjack follows a young woman coming back to Florida, trying to understand who she is through the places that shaped her — even if only part-time. The title refers to a fish native to these waters, elusive and strong, often unseen until it’s hooked. To me, it’s a metaphor for memory, identity, and everything we chase when we’re trying to grow up.
This is a coming-of-age story, but not just in the traditional sense. It’s about reckoning with the fragments of a place — and a self — that never fully settled. I wanted to make a film that lets Florida be strange, sticky, liminal — the way it always felt to me.